Introduction

We have received several requests to provide information on the translation service, Straker Translations. Our preliminary research reveals that Straker translation is a large, corporate, translation service that is based in New Zealand. Reading straker translations reviews indicate that many customers have had negative experiences, as have translators who have worked for the company. They are not registered with the BBB in spite of having offices in the United States.

In addition to conducting an investigation into the company and their practices, we also placed an order for translation services. The remainder of this review will be based upon our experiences as well as information we gained from other sources.

Services Offered

We were able to determine that the company offers both machine and human translation services. They specifically offer website translation and localization, personal translation, business video and industry translation, and CMS translation for both WordPress and Magento. For this review, we placed an order to have a 20-page business document translated from English into French.

Prices And Add Ons

Anyone considering using this service should be aware that getting a price quote requires giving personal information as well as scanning in documents. This could be problematic with confidential documents. We asked a customer service agent via live chat what the costs of translations were. She indicated for business documents it was between 14 and 20 cents per word. This is quite a bit higher than average. Because our project was quite simple, we paid 15 cents per word.

Quality of Services

Many straker translation reviews indicated some issues with quality. Unfortunately, this was our experience as well. There were several key errors in the translated document that significantly changed its meaning. There were also several missing items between the original and the translation. The result was a document that was nearly unreadable, and that had obvious holes in the content. We wondered what kind of QA process would miss something so glaringly obvious. Overall, we were very disappointed in the quality of work that we received.

Pros & Cons

We realize there are a lot of things to consider when investing in translation, localization, or interpretation services. To make it easier to consider which service to use, we have created a brief list of the pros and cons we have identified about this company.

Pros:

Variety of Services Offered

Online Customer Service is Polite And Helpful

Document Delivered on Time

Cons:

Poor Quality Translation

No Upfront Pricing

Prices Significantly Inflated

Mediocre Reviews

Lack of Good Quality Control

Summary

We must recommend that anyone considering using this company for translation services avoid placing an order. The company simply does not provide the type of quality that justifies the prices that they charge. Our order was badly handled. That in combination with the inflated prices, mediocre reviews, and failure to provide upfront pricing have led us to this conclusion. Anyone in need of translation services is invited to check out our other reviews. We are certain they will find a good match.

6 customer reviews of StrakerTranslations.com

Tad A.

recommended this service

Positive: The client supports are super cute! Actually, I'm ready to forgive a lot if I see a person loves their job. But my writer was rather impolite and couldn't - or didn't want to - rephrase their questions so I could understand what's expected of me.